Asked by: John Grogan (Labour - Keighley)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, when he plans to receive the high conflict practice pathway from Cafcass designed to provide guidance to practitioners on cases of parental alienation.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Cafcass launched its Child Impact Assessment Framework in October 2018. It is available at https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/grown-ups/professionals/ciaf/. The framework, which incorporates the award-winning Domestic Abuse Practice Pathway, brings together guides and tools which Cafcass officers can use to help them assess the impact on the child of different case factors in private law cases, including: domestic abuse; harmful conflict; child refusal or resistance to spend time with one of their parents, which includes parental alienation; and other forms of harmful parenting.
Asked by: John Grogan (Labour - Keighley)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of data available to his Department on the prevalence of parental alienation.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
In October last year the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) launched its Child Impact Assessment Framework (CIAF) which sets out how children may experience parental separation and how this can be understood and acted on by Cafcass.
Cafcass is planning to undertake a review of its case records featuring actual or alleged alienating behaviours so that it has a clearer evidence base on the prevalence of parental alienation and its relationships with other case factors. This study will commence once the CIAF has been fully embedded into practice.
Asked by: John Grogan (Labour - Keighley)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the policy is of the Bradford coroner on the use of digital scans to establish cause of death rather than tradition post-mortems; and how many times such scans have been used in (a) 2017 and (b) 2018 to date.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
The use of digital scans to establish cause of death is a matter for individual coroners who decide how to proceed in light of guidance from the Chief Coroner. The guidance can be found on his website at:
www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/guidance-no-1-use-of-port-mortem-imaging.pdf
The figures for the number of post mortems held in 2017 which involved less invasive techniques are available at:
Bradford is in the West Yorkshire (western) coroner area, in which 267 less-invasive post mortems were conducted in 2017.
Annual coroner statistics are collected at the end of the year. Statistics for 2018 will be published in May 2019.